Burson-Marsteller PR

The Guardian says it best: “The world’s biggest PR company was employed by the Nigerian government to discredit reports of genocide during the Biafran war, the Argentinian junta after the disappearance of 35,000 civilians, and the Indonesian government after the massacres in East Timor. It also worked to improve the image of the late Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and the Saudi royal family. Its corporate clients have included the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which suffered a partial meltdown in 1979, Union Carbide after the Bhopal gas leak killed up to 15,000 people in India, BP after the sinking of the Torrey Canyon oil tanker in 1967 and the British government after BSE emerged. In the past few years it has acted for big tobacco companies and the European biotechnology industry to challenge the green lobby and counter Greenpeace arguments on GM food.”

The PR firm also supported Peabody Energy Corp., the world’s largest private-sector coal company, in its Advanced Energy for Life campaign “extolling the virtues of coal for poor people,” a fact revealed by the Climate Investigations Center.

In early 2018, Burson-Marsteller and Cohn & Wolfe merged to form Burson Cohn & Wolfe under the parent company WPP.

2014 Climate Survey Response

Clients and Campaigns

According to DeSmog Blog, in 2002, National Public Relations, Canada’s largest PR agency and an affiliate of Burson-Marsteller, set up an Astroturf group called the Canadian Coalition for Responsible Environmental Solutions, which lobbied against Canadian ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.